MSNBC’s Wagnerian Opera

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Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers. Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the media industry. Tonight, we go inside MSNBC, where the ill-fated Maddow-to-Wagner succession plan has dragged on ratings, sapped the network of its competitive edge and created an opening for CNN to reclaim influence in primetime. As Wagner is feted by MSNBC brass, many insiders are asking: What, exactly, are we celebrating?

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MSNBC’s Wagnerian Opera

Alex Wagner’s early ratings suggest that the MSNBC audience may be actively tuning her out. It’s an invitation for Tapper and Licht to quit the apparent mutual disarmament pact around 9 p.m. and take back the hour.

DYLAN BYERS

“The hour is in play now,” a high-level CNN insider told me this week. This person was referring, of course, to 9 p.m., a time slot that has historically been the cornerstone of the cable news primetime lineup and the high-water mark for ratings. For more than a decade, CNN has ceded primetime to MSNBC because it never had a talent who could compete with Rachel Maddow, a formidable, once-in-a-generation progressive hero and cable star who regularly drew 2-3 million viewers to her nightly broadcast, and whose success buoyed ratings across the network. While Maddow occasionally courted numbers...

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